Best Doctors 2010: Eliminating Parkinson's symptoms with exercise

When Jay Alberts, a biomedical engineer at the Cleveland Clinic and an avid cyclist, noticed that a friend’s Parkinson’s disease symptoms improved after rides, he and Dr. Micheal D. Phillips started studying exercise’s effect on Parkinson’s patients. What they found is that patients who pedaled at a rate of 80-90 rpm for 40 minutes three times a week had a 30 to 35 percent improvement in their symptoms — about the same relief drugs and deep brain stimulation offer. “The same brain regions that become active when you give someone medication are also seen from exercise,” Phillips says.